What is it about?
Online misinformation has had several real-world consequences over the past few years, and interventions to thwart it have had varying degrees of success and scalability. In this work, we conduct a literature review to provide a deeper understanding of the human factors behind misinformation; namely, how it is enabled through human cognition and different group memberships of people. We look into theories of how people parse information and their motivations behind its use. Through this, we provide recommendations for practitioners of anti-misinformation interventions, as well as directions for future research.
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Why is it important?
This work brings social science and psychological insights into explicit conversation with how the spread of misinformation manifests online. Therefore, it makes suggestions on how to better tailor anti-misinformation interventions, in addition to identifying research gaps that remain open from our current understanding of the role of human cognition and group psychology on misinformation.
Perspectives
There is a good amount of great research on misinformation and its factors in the social science, HCI, and data mining literature, but these distinct types of scholarship remain somewhat disjointed. Here, we attempted to bring them together, documenting cognitive and socio-psychological phenomena, how these may manifest online, and what this often looks like at scale. By drawing on these types of literature, we may be better placed to probe the roots of misinformation proliferation and, consequently, to enrich our best-practice perspectives on the design of anti-misinformation interventions.
Alexandros Efstratiou
University College London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Adherence to Misinformation on Social Media Through Socio-Cognitive and Group-Based Processes, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, November 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3555589.
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